5.16 Writing Back 2: Getting Over Our Essay Anxiety

Key Terms:

• • Conduit metaphor - A linguistic concept, that if we can structure, control, and limit the connotative diction in our writing, that our communication might travel from speaker to audience with minimal misunderstanding.
  • Essai - Verb, after the pioneering creator Michel de Montaigne; to try, to attempt, to explore, especially the exploring of one’s own thinking

 

IronyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is so Common It’s Cringe

Welp–I got back from my local writers workshop group, copies of my poem to Andrew Marvell in hand, and I was both gratified and reflective. Gratified because the group liked the poem and seemed to have a good time with it. I received some questions about some of my approaches and style choices, but there was a fair amount of praise. As much as anything else, though, there were few comments about the overall meaning of the poem, beyond its carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More tone and seeming pledge to goodness ahead. Yes, they followed the surface ideas–though I had to explain the meaning of ASMR to one reader–and I had offered them Marvell’s original poem for reference. 

But what I learned about is what they didn’t discuss; and I can hardly blame, I think, a workshop that is designed to improve the craft of writing–they read for the nuts and bolts, not for the analysis. They did not see that I had crafted a speaker who has so obviously lived a shallow life that, when the dreaded Death arrives, he’s willing to falsely promise anything to get a few more years in, even while practicing his imagery and poor logic for the more famous seduction in the next scene, the one written by Marvell.

My fault. They didn’t see the ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More built into the structure, and mine was probably far too subtle, hatched as it was in the deeper dialogue you and I have been having. I need to tip that particular facet of the poem more obviously. But that’s a fine line, isn’t it? I could write an open satire or parody of Marvell’s style or make brazen plans to waste more time in spurious claims for reform, let the weight of the hyperbole tip everyone off. I’ll have to play more with it. 

I put this original draft on the Waywords Studio website–the link is in the show notes–and I’ll let you know when I get a revision put together. 

But I wonder. We’re in an odd time for reading satire and ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More, I think. We’ve seen ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More become such an innate part of almost every social message that it’s hard to sort out a conventional ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More from a third or fourth layer of meta-, what Nathaniel Sloane calls a hyper-referentiality. The online language is so heavily pre-packaged in its own flattened-culture ideologies–er, the idea that all cultures and histories are squashed together in digital space–and that those who are “alive” to this concept themselves bring a kind of progressivism with their readings–  . . So the online language has so much of this, that anyone who drops something into it with a notion of speaking sincerely, unironically, is considered “cringe.”  I’ve mentioned this concept earlier, this idea of irony-poisoning, that I’m putting a pin in this idea for later discussion at length.

But in the meantime, what happens is that we get a couple kinds of readers out there in terms of ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More. The first, perhaps an ‘old school’ reader, begins with the premise that everything is sincere unless it is a clear parody. The second is this more contemporary savvy reader who yawns at ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More as mere expectation, falls himself blind to it since it is so normalized. And somewhere else, I’ll call them the ‘slower reader,” a rare breed, slows long enough to see if something else is going on.

I don’t want to write a parody, but the kind of online ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More out that I see mostly could also be called “snark,” and that’s not what we’re after, either. That’s just a tone or attitude, just a short strategic step away from “troll.” 

I’m not sure what becomes of the ironic speaker in literature in the meantime, short of labeling them so and moving on. 

But we’re here today for some genuine work in front of us, what so many would also consider cringeworthy. Not writing back to authors and world–that is cool. But I want to spend some time having us consider doing so in the form of (*gasp*) an essay.

But why? Why so cruel? Why do I want to ruin what we have together? We’ve had a good thing going! An essay just seems like, I dunno, homework. —But I get you. You’re not wrong. It does sound like homework. And while I don’t expect to single-handedly save the essay from its partly-deserved outcast status, I hope to offer it some re-framing for us, and I’m going to challenge us to play with it.  

After all, we’re at the end of our journey with Andrew Marvell and his carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More stuff for now (for now), so it’s time for the end-of-journey reflection, some “Phew! I made it!” sort of thinking. We want this to have been worthwhile, and–unlike all this stuff we call creative writing–the essay form is actually the mode of writing most open to creativity. No, you heard that right–I am making the argument that what most all of you might imagine is the most boring of all writing is actually one of the most freeing. 

And I’m going to also risk something even more cringe. I say that with a bit of an ironic eye, the essay writer may even —- redeem sincerity!

Intro Theme 

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I’m probably going to stomp on a few traditions today.

Why Write Back?

Let’s get us back in the right mode and mood, though, okay? It’s been several weeks since we tried our first approach to writing back and I chose a poem to do it. But why are we doing this, again? What’s the real value in it? 

I’ve got a bunch of reasons. And I’m betting that most of them make sense to you: 

1. To Settle Our Heads Around Difficult Ideas: Writing back is a powerful way to process the complexity of ideas we’ve met in reading that passive reading doesn’t allow. Writing forces us to put those ideas into the foreground of our thinking, rather than shrug it off as “interesting” or “cool” and then moving on.This falls into the first goal of writing: To write first for ourselves. Write so that we ourselves gain something valuable from it; if we don’t write about what we want to consider, why are we doing it? It clarifies our thinking.
2. To Burn Ideas into Our Brains: No question that writing puts ideas into our long-term or sustained storage for later use. 
3. And writing back Marks Ourselves as Part of the Authorial Discourse: Writing back places our own voice into the ongoing conversation that literature represents. It’s entering the tradition of poems talking to other writers, to other literature, not merely a spectator. Along with everything else, you get to be kind of an expert, literally an ‘author’ity” on the subject.
4. Being part of that discourse Perpetuates and Elevates topics Important to you: Writing back is done second, for everyone else. By writing, it’s our ideas about topics that get sustained, and if we do something new with them–don’t merely imitate–then others see your ideas as important, a part of that discourse we just mentioned.
5. Of course that writing Engages Thoughtfully, Builds Upon, or Refutes Ideas: When we write back, using the original work to respond to, we mark it with our own hot takes, so that other readers are as likely to think of our ideas as they are the original’s. 
6. To Attune Ourselves to Literary Techniques and Improve Our Own Writing: We might imitate style, allude to original imagery, or revisit scenes that can “attune us to the poetic techniques” used by the author we are responding to. Learning from experts makes our own writing better. Always.
7. To Address Lingering Questions: I keep this one separately from just sorting our thinking and remembering it. Those questions we have about what we read, the Questions We Carry, are significant enough for us to explore them. Once we write, we can carry them forward, more prepared to see them applied to the next thing we read.
8. Taking AccountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More Seriously: Let’s underscore the why a bit more. Choosing to engage deeply with a text, rather than ignoring or simply dismissing it, is an act of holding oneself accountable for the “installation” of that text (or its absence) in one’s thinking or community. In other words, we are responsible for what we choose to do or not do with the reading we encounter, wherever we do it. The blank space we leave in communities when we don’t write back is on us; it’s a blank space others will never benefit from. Writing back is a powerful exercise in accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More.

So why are we writing back? Because it’s active, personal, and public; it transforms reading into deep learning, gets us thinking critically, and participating meaningfully in a cultural dialogue across time. It’s a way to engage the questions that texts raise, especially the difficult conversations they provoke. It’s the only way I know–this act of composition–to keep it all going, to keep us at our best, to keep us thinking.

But Why Oh Why an Essay? The Conduit of Fear

Can I approach this essay question, then, from a side angle?  I’ll tell you what I’m thinking and then we’ll sort of back our way into exactly why everyone gets so riled up about these things. 

I mentioned when we began our journey some months ago now that Andrew Marvell didn’t publish much of his poetry at all. Our best guess is that he showed them only to a few, perhaps fellow poets who he knew would “get it,” would understand what he was up to. He understood, especially from the responses he received from a lot of his political work, that audiences will misinterpret. Yes, “To His Coy Mistress” has some clever turns about it, but how many readers would take the time as we have to challenge any more of it at length? It’s clear to me even today that most who read the poem, including some university professor-types, stop at the question of seduction, and at best give some small lip service to the metaphysical nature of the poem. Marvell understood. And, perhaps, he was apprehensive about it.

This is the apprehension of being taken out of context, of being misread, of being held to account for what we didn’t actually write–and I get it. Intentionally or unintentionally readers will fail to understand … fear and apprehension.  But it goes both ways: readers also fear misinterpreting. This whole miscommunication thing is really scary. Even the Roman poet Horace has been misread across the literally millenia, misinterpreted at two levels: first, most don’t see his Ode 11 as a poem of possible seduction–I didn’t understand it as one until I started digging at its contextual historical notes and the literary traditions of classical age ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More; second, we have mistranslated that poem in fateful, culturally transformative ways. Horace tried to give us a complex EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More philosophy in the parable of an ode, and look where it got him? Well, I guess he’s famous, anyway. That’s something. 

In terms of missing the ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More, we are all in good company, from The Onion to Alanis Morissette. 

Stephen Colbert in his original faux Conservative pose, The Amazon series The Boys (which is full on satire), even American Psycho and Robocop –all have been misinterpreted by people who do not understand how ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More works. Kind of sad.

So maybe we should go the other way. Why not just spell it all out? Like Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or The Six Million Dollar Man.  This approach, this fear and apprehension of being misunderstood, has led us to some pretty frightful practices in writing.  I think it’s partly responsible for something called the Conduit Metaphor. Now, you know what this is even if you have not heard that term for it.

This is the idea that, if only we can control language carefully, structure it precisely, select our words strategically so as to limit their connotative slipperiness, we can somehow beam our ideas directly from our mouths to the audience’s ears; or, in the case of writing, from mind to mind. That way, there is less of this outside interference which keeps wrecking our talk.

The words slide through this tube, this conduit, that is somehow impervious to our ideas being pirated along the way. The Conduit Metaphor. 

And so we revert to lecture, delivery of information, informational writing and exposition, didactic writing, instead of parable, satire, humor, dialogue, tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More, nuance, and the like. This has its own degree of safety, but also fails for all the reasons Rilke talked about a couple of weeks ago when we could discover our humanity through art: “You must change your life.”

One thing that the Conduit Metaphor allows, however, is something called illustration. I’ll call it narrative, or story. We can tell stories inside our lectures, inside our prose, inside our argument, kind of like little blurb objects which exist inside the structured language, just like some good parentheses, a cited quotation, or a cool statistic.

Ah, but it’s not really like those. The illustration, the story, is like a little bomb inside our words, ready to explode with narrative potential, much like any literature. Think about how I used my Amway story last week when we talked about Bellow. 

For me and many, story is a key, it moves us ironically from the limited perceiver to the less limited perceiver; it is the instructional model, the concept of learning. Dramatic ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is discovery - a big one - into more complicated thought. It involves narrative layers, figurative nuance, tensions and complexity, but the odds are we never talked about these in school. Did we? We got “illustration” in a list of tools we could use along with facts, statistics, examples, expert opinion and reasoning. I know. The textbooks told me to offer all of these in just this way. 

The essay, that dreaded Beast that all of us have encountered almost exclusively through school, feels to most of the world as a dreary and deadly and dull and useless endeavor. We learn about it often as the five paragraph essay, and other forms that are only variations of that, involving clear topic sentences, a set number of reasons or justifications, a set number of sentences per paragraph, and conclusions which repeat what we just damn well wrote. If your teacher gave you the Toulmin model, you learned the words claim, evidence, and warrant.

So our conduit metaphor has been a foundation for much of this traditional instruction about writing, especially essays: Write according to the prescribed rules for maximum effectiveness. Limit the possibilities for possible misinterpretation. But it’s not the sole reason essays were taught as they are. There is also the pedagogical concern of grading efficiently. In other words, students churn out a lot of essays, and grading them all on meritable thinking is a long process. But you know, there is no such thing as a five paragraph essay in the world at large. We teachers invent them, have invented them, in the public school system in large part so that teachers may evaluate their structure without needing to read or understand a word of the subject. 

My five paragraph essay on my summer job:

Having a job is good. (Good, a broad general opening. Now narrow in slowly to the thesis!)I like to have jobs and I have had a lot of them. There are good jobs to have and some that are not so good. One of my favorite jobs is to work at McDonald’s in the summer. (Now the thesis, be sure it lists three reasons for the topic you will write:)  I like to work at McDonalds in the summer because of my friends, the free food, and the shake machine.

(Great. Now for this second paragraph, start with a topic sentence for the first reason you will talk about.) The first reason I like to work at McDonald’s in the summer is the shake machine. (Now offer some reasons, maybe three again, why this is a good point.) It’s a good job because it’s cold and gives out ice cream on hot days. Every time I use it, the machine keeps me cooler. The ice cream is also sweet. (Don’t forget to add a “con” and then explain why it’s not a good argument.) Of course, sometimes it does not work well, but I know how to fix it mostly, so that’s good. (And to conclude, repeat. . . ) And that’s the first reason I like working at McDonald’s.

(And let’s do the same thing now with the next body paragraph.) The second reason I like to—

Yeah. We know that’s a crappy essay because nobody likes working the shake machine. Nobody.

The good news is that these essays are finally starting to die in schools, but not nearly fast enough, for my tastes. Educational rubrics are more and more discussing notions of content and development and unity of idea and the like, but they are still a far cry from the essay’s potential for students learning to write.. More good news is that the professional essay is back on the rise, with more people writing creative, personal, and narrative essays across multiple genres and mediums, even long-form video essays on YouTube which are notoriously popular. No where to be seen? Anything akin to the five-paragraph model. 

Check out YouTube channels like Deep Cuts for music, In Praise of Shadows for horror explorations, Defunctland for some genre-pushing approaches, or people like Jacob Geller, Solar Sands, Jenny Nicholson, or of course PhilosophyTube with Abigail Thorn. It’s at the moment one the faster-growing genres of composition. More, the written essay is back as an online incarnation, especially in various social media platforms. Some folks are tired of scrolling and want to settle in. Good deal.

So does this mean we don’t teach structure anymore? No. What about writing in a rhetorical mode? Sure. The Toulmin model? Okay, that’s me, too. Can I use my SAT rubrics? I guess. But wait–didn’t you just argue–?  So then what does the teacher do if those structures need to happen but they limit the potential in writing? Fair. I’m not here in this podcast to teach five paragraph models for SAT or AP. These are important for folks, yes, and I’ll probably offer it along the way. After all, I did that kind of stuff for 35 years, though not exactly like the textbooks asked, and my 1992 essay in NCTE’s English Journal took issue with this kind of instruction, and I still resist it because it’s responsible for students and later adults hating writing.

Structure is important, there’s structure for poetry which is meaningful and there are structures for essay which are also meaningful. In other words, the structure serves the purpose for the writer’s meaning, not the other way around. We don’t prescribe structure and then force student ideas to fill it. Period.  There is a certain clarity which comes from rhetorical modes based upon tradition, but that’s true in all forms of writing, and we select the rhetorical mode most suited to our purposes.

But if you are listening to this podcast right now, and you know I’m going to ask us to write an essay in response to something we’ve been talking about, and you have already decided, Nope to the Nope, think a bit longer on why you’re having that response. And what caused it. 

Writing for Uncertainty

So I’ve ranted a bit on what we shouldn’t be doing, but I’ve given short shrift so far to what we could be. One of our future seasons or journeys will focus on the works of French essayist Michel de Montaigne, but I will say right now that I am a huge fan, so if you know him in any detail, you know where I’m going.

Most essays we are asked to write are deductive in structure. That is, they offer us their conclusion, then set about demonstrating its truth with specifics. This is fairly contrary to the brain of the human animal, which is far more inductive. We tend to encounter a lot of specific experiences and then assemble them into conclusions. That’s what the past 16 episodes have been doing. Naturally, because, um, it is.

Montaigne gave us the word for “essay,” (yes, it’s his fault), but he really didn’t think of it exclusively as a noun (that was what teachers did when they told you to turn it in Monday). Instead it’s a verb meaning “to try, to attempt, to explore.” Oooh, wait there. Explore? Cool. Exploring our thinking on ideas is exactly what he did, starting in one place but never certainly ending where he started. And why should he? If you only explore your own backyard, you’re kind of defeating the idea before you get started. To essai is to explore. Let’s think of it this way, an inductive process of discovering and assembling ideas, of wandering, like nomads. 

What form should it take? Can it tell a story? Should it ask questions? Can I end it without a solid conclusion? 

What, you’re waiting for some yes or no responses? The approach to your essay should be governed by just a couple of questions: what do you want to say and to whom do you want to say it? Now design it in a way that makes sense.

Remember what I said going into this about why we write back: to explore difficult ideas, to enter into the discourse, to become an authority, to settle your thinking for the future, to hold yourself accountable for your ideas in the communities they exist. 

This is going to mean experimentation, but definitely real thought on the form and approach you want to take to get you there, the same decisions you would make in writing a poem as free verse or sonnet, a story as theater or novel series. A lot of people have been writing essays, so we read them with the same fervor and inquiry as we read any writer; what are they doing that works? But when schools cordoned off essay writing into spaces where the rest of literature and creative writing didn’t live, they nearly killed an entire genre and they definitely stained its reputation.  

I don’t know where your essay or mine will end up, how could we?, but that’s the fun of the exploration, and part of the joy of composition. Explore. Discover. Into the uncertain spaces with you! Write back. 

But What Do I Write About?

If you’ve been following along, you’ve been carrying questions about our stops and discoveries. I had several—well, six–that included how to live our lives without death anxiety, about Marvell’s responsibility for what he wrote (or how we misinterpret it), about the biological urge to legacy, things like that. What were yours? Take one. Dig in.

Or grab one or more of our writers. What do you want to say to them? What did they understand or fail to? Where were you left with issues? Explore them.

For me, I’m obviously really caught up in this question of ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More. How do we understand Dorian Gray, as victim or villain? What makes him either considering what our own egos desire? How is Marvell’s speaker much different from the YOLO attitude? We’re disgusted by him, but is this because we use the same techniques ourselves? Isn’t he also a victim of the same anxieties we all share? Our fear of death? Notice how all of these are an effort to move from a limited perspective to a less limited perspective, but this requires an opening up, an exploration of ideas where we may not find the same kinds of answers we’d create in thesis sentences.

But I want the same thing for readers of my essay, to discover that there are greater complexities to ideas, some that even contradict themselves or point awkwardly to ourselves, places of discomfiture. I am an ironic perceiver. I have blind spots, spaces of uncertainty and changeability. But I do know that my ideas are more complicated than bumper stickers. My six questions simply cannot be solved in a snarky meme or a zinger. Neither can theirs. 

I need my readers, of me, of everything, to know there is more out there than the bumper sticker, more humanity out there than that simple reading. This is why I taught for so long, why I still do, and why I still write: to move my readers to my place or view of the world. In this way, all writing is suasive in nature, and this is something else that will require at least two or three episodes to talk about. So much ahead! 

Okay. So to get readers to understand me and themselves as ironic perceivers who have an obligation to read more deeply. . .  If I write the Toulmin model for this, it’s merely a lecture. That won’t go well. I need a different approach. 

On my car is a license frame where I have a simple quotation from educator Paolo Freire, a thinker who powers much of what Waywords Studio is about. It’s short and pithy: “Education is Freedom.” For me, this captures a great deal, but is really a slippery and complicated little affair if left alone. That will be my open topic, that license plate frame. 

I’m going to structure my essay, I think, as a kind of interview where I’m asked about it, and the more I’m asked, the more detailed I have to become. The more detailed I become, the more problematic the phrase becomes, until my (or our) confidence in it is not nearly so simple. The increasing pursuit for answers thus demonstrates the danger of accepting the simple direct answer. I’ll offer the first answer or two as something we might find in the traditional five-paragraph essay model, then stretch out into new territory.

Will it work? How should I know? But it might be fun to try, and it’s definitely worth my settling in on that topic for a time rather than growing complacent with it.  I see the essay as an articulation for me and my ideas as much as for my readers. If it isn’t helping me sort my thinking, I’m doing something wrong. We’re all ironic perceivers; we all need to recognize that mastery of an idea does not mean certainty of that idea.

Yeah, But Who Is Reading This Thing?

Who’s reading this? You are. That’s always the first place. After that, we have all of the possibilities that we’ve spoken to in the episode on Having Hard Conversations. Engage others in talk or letter-writing or blog posting or (more bravely) a video post. Turn it into a social media post. Send it out into the world. Mail it to friends, to family (weird, I know). Mail it to strangers, then.  Send it to a fan group of your topic, on a Reddit board or Discord or wherever their communities are. (I don’t always favor LinkedIn essays, by the way, because they claim they own your content after you post. Rotten little . . . )

The point is, someone should read it, somewhere, better still if they can respond to your ideas. That’s what this has been about, really. We’ve been a lot of places already, wrestled with a bunch of people’s ideas on carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More, seizing and plucking, ethics and seduction, power and ambiguities, ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More and . . . more ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More. What have you been thinking about it?  Write it down.

This should bring us to one place: that writing back to the authors, to works, to the broader world is a good thing for ourselves and a better thing for our communities. Later, we’ll get into particulars, approaches, styles, tones, techniques, all those things. More, in the next season’s journey we’ll be zeroing in on a few essays to read directly. Because if you haven’t caught on, yet, from my view, essays are literature, too. Or at least they can be. 

And you know what? If we look over this entire episode (and most of the ones I’ve made for this podcast), they’re basically essays. I began with my concerns about the ironic speaker and what becomes of readers, reminded us why we need to write (for ourselves first, remember) and why it’s important for others to read it, diagnosed our fears of traditionally taught essays and why that teaching did not really serve most of us well, offered us some different premises for beginning our writing, and closed with how some of that approach may work for my own concerns about reading and ironic tone. (And yes, to the good-natured pedants out there, I never said that introductions, conclusions, and some sense of unity were unimportant–I said that we need to learn the craft of essay writing from thoughtful essayists.)

And where do we start in reading essays? Actually, I’m not worried overmuch about you finding them, because they are everywhere if you avoid most pop culture commentary and what calls itself journalism these days. If you’d like a few of my favorites, you might look for Zadie Smith or Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin or Martin Amis, or folks who write about language and literature like Umberto Eco or Jorge Luis Borges. The point is that wherever you find them, pay attention as much to how they assemble their thoughts as what they say. 

So go write the essay. I’ll post mine shortly on Waywords Studio. But, if you’re still a bit uncertain, first

Go read something. 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography:

Sloan, Nathaniel. “Beyond Based and Cringe: An Examination of Contemporary Modes of IronyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More and Sincerity in Cultural Production.” InVisible Culture, no. 34, May 2022. www.invisibleculturejournal.com, https://doi.org/10.47761/494a02f6.7090a2e8.